Native Facter

An implementation of facter functionality in C++11, providing:

a shared library which gather facts about the system
an executable for standalone command line usage
a gem with a facter-like interface, for use in ruby applications

Build Requirements

GCC 4.8+ or Clang 5.0+ (OSX)
CMake >= 2.8.12
Boost C++ Libraries >= 1.54
yaml-cpp >= 0.5.1

Optional Build Libraries

OpenSSL >= 1.0.1.g - enables SSH fingerprinting facts.
libblkid (Linux only) - enables the partitions fact.

Initial Setup

Setup on Fedora 20

The following will install all required tools and libraries:

yum install cmake boost-devel openssl-devel yaml-cpp-devel libblkid-devel gcc-c++ make

Setup on Mac OSX Mavericks (homebrew)

This assumes Clang is installed and the system OpenSSL libraries will be used.

The following will install all required libraries:

brew install cmake boost yaml-cpp

Setup on Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty)

The following will install most required tools and libraries:

apt-get install build-essential cmake libboost-all-dev libssl-dev libyaml-cpp-dev libblkid-dev

Pre-Build

All of the following examples start by assuming the current directory is the root of the repo.

Before building cfacter, use cmake to generate build files:

$ mkdir release
$ cd release
$ cmake ..

To generate build files with debug information:

$ mkdir debug
$ cd debug
$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ..

Before building the gem, install the cfacter bundle:

$ cd gem
$ bundle install

Build

To build cfacter, use 'make':

$ cd release
$ make

To build cfacter with debug information:

$ cd debug
$ make

To build the cfacter gem:

$ cd gem
$ rake gem

The gem will be created in the gem/pkg directory.

Run

You can run cfacter from where it was built:

$ release/bin/cfacter

For a debug build:

$ debug/bin/cfacter

Test

You can run cfacter tests using the test target:

$ cd release
$ make test

For a debug build:

$ cd debug
$ make test

For verbose test output, run ctest instead of using the test target:

$ cd release
$ ctest -V

To run gem tests:

$ cd gem
$ rspec

Install

You can install cfacter into your system:

$ cd release
$ make && sudo make install

By default, cfacter will install files into /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/lib, and /usr/local/include.

To install to a different location, set the install prefix:

$ cd release
$ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~ ..
$ make clean install

This would install cfacter into ~/bin, ~/lib, and ~/include.

To install the gem (assumes gem is already built):

$ cd gem
$ gem install pkg/cfacter*.gem

Uninstall

Run the following command to remove files that were previously installed:

$ sudo xargs rm < release/install_manifest.txt

To uninstall the gem:

$ gem uninstall cfacter

Documentation

To generate API documentation, install doxygen 1.8.7 or later.

$ cd lib
$ doxygen

To view the documentation, open lib/html/index.html in a web browser.

Using The C++11 API

This section assumes that cfacter has been installed into the system.

Here's a simple example of using the C++11 API to output all facts as YAML.

#include <facter/facts/collection.hpp>
#include <facter/logging/logging.hpp>
#include <iostream>

using namespace std;
using namespace facter::facts;
using namespace facter::logging;

int main()
{
    configure_logging(log_level::info);

    // Create a fact collection and write the collection out
    collection facts;
    facts.add_default_facts();
    facts.add_external_facts();
    facts.write(cout, format::yaml);
    cout << endl;
}

To build the above, link with libfacter:

$ g++ example.cc -o myfacter -std=c++11 -lfacter
$ ./myfacter

parisiale/cfacter